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Quote by Charles Montgomery

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Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design

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Author

Charles Montgomery
Charles Montgomery

Charles Montgomery, born in 1968, is a Canadian writer who focuses on urban life, human behavior, and sustainability. His works often delve into the relationship between urban planning and human happiness, and how design can improve the quality of life for urban residents. more

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“Much as participatory design and placemaking was a reaction to the lack of citizen involvement in the planning process, the history of incremental city design was a reaction to the utopian master plan that dictated whole scale redevelopment in favor of an incremental approach that gradually affected the status quo. As a theory of policymaking, incrementalism was first introduced by Charles Lindblom in the 1950s.”

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“Modern interest in environmentalism is driven by a yearning to protect what we haven't ruined already, to conserve what we haven't used up, to restore as much as possible of what we're destroyed, and to devise ways of reconfiguring our lives so that civilization as we know it can be sustained through our children's lifetimes and beyond.”

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“Today, one marvels at the conversions of old buildings that are now offices and and residences or both. Office buildings are apartment houses, mansions are office buildings, manufacturing lofts are apartments, tenement apartments are small factories, everything from a barge to a barn is a restaurant...These buildings were not designed with flexibility in mind, but their manageable scale provided inherent adjustability and their design and quality constriction provided inherent appeal.”

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“The greatest environmental gains from population density arise once destinations become so close to one another that people elect to get around all by themselves - the urban-transit equivalent of the point at which a nuclear chain reaction becomes self-sustaining.”

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“Stacking and concentrating dwellings and businesses is the easiest way to make communities truly efficient, and it is the only way to achieve deep reductions in per-capita energy use and carbon output in large, prosperous populations...”

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“Q: Why We Drive is a unique book, combining cartoons, text-form journalism, and photographs. How did it come about? After I did the book CARtoons in 2001, I got invitations to speak at various venues including The Village Building Convergence, bookstores and a few universities. Being a visual artist, I gradually developed a slide talk about the social, environmental, economic and political problems of transportation design in America. I used a mixture of cartoons, photographs and maps because I found it was helpful to give people real-world examples of good and bad urban design. When I got positive feedback from the talk, I became interested in turning it into a book and an interactive website. I still have to build the interactive website but Microcosm helped me create, edit and publish the book. My goal was to explain transportation design issues and politics in a simple way to college students and the general public, as well as put forward a few ideas about why I believe we’re not making more political progress at reforming our transportation system. (2015 interview with Microcosm Publishing)2015”

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